Alinean Joins Content Marketing Institute

ORLANDO, Fla., Nov. 18, 2010 /PRNewswire/ -- Alinean, the leading creator of value-based interactive sales and marketing tools for B2B vendors, today announced its charter sponsorship of the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), the go-to source for practical how-to content marketing advice and one-on-one consulting. As a charter member of CMI, Alinean's thought leaders in value selling and marketing contribute key best practice research, advice and interactive tools to institute members and the growing CMI readership. As defined by the CMI, content marketing is the discipline of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

"Content marketing is becoming more important to connect and engage with today's overloaded buyer," said Tom Pisello, Chairman and Founder of Alinean. "Fight Frugalnomics, the technique of helping B2B vendors understand and implement best practices to meet today's economic buyer needs, is a priority. As a charter sponsor of CMI, Alinean brings the expertise in developing content marketing strategies and tools to fight frugalnomics to CMI's members."

"Engage or perish" is now the defining tag-line driving many new B2B marketing strategies. While content marketing is a priority for many B2B marketing organizations, marketers are challenged with truly engaging their buyers. In the recent research, B2B Content Marketing: 2010 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends  by Junta42 and MarketingProfs, on average, over a quarter of the total marketing and communications budget is allocated for content marketing and 51% of B2B marketers are increasing budgets for content marketing over the next 12 months. However, producing the kind of the content that engages is the top challenge that was identified.

"Alinean's interactive smart content and dynamic sales tools provide marketers with new ways to engage frugal prospects and economic buyers more effectively," said Joe Pulizzi, founder of CMI and co-author of THE handbook on content marketing, Get Content Get Customers. "We look forward to Alinean providing related research, best practice advice, and tools to CMI members to help them engage with buyers who are increasingly skeptical."

About the Content Marketing Institute (CMI)

Developed by Junta42, CMI gives B2B and B2C marketers no-nonsense, practical content marketing advice direct from the pros on topics such as content strategy, creation, promotion, distribution, management, measurement and analysis. The institute provides education and consulting to help guide the efficient development of more effective content, helping marketers optimize return on investment from content marketing.

About Alinean

Alinean is the leading developer of value-based interactive demand generation and sales tools – driving sales and marketing effectiveness by empowering B2B solution providers to better prove and improve the value of solutions to frugal prospects and customers. Alinean fundamentally changes the way that B2B solution providers engage with prospects – via targeted SaaS-delivered interactive tools that revolutionize corporate website interactions, sales presentations and proposals from antiquated feature/function/price selling, to customer-focused value engagements. Alinean tools are used to automate opportunity discovery, align goals and solutions and quantify return on investment (ROI) by companies such as HP, IBM, Microsoft, EMC, Dell, Intel, AT&T, Siemens, Unisys, Thomson Reuters, NetApp, Citrix, Symantec, Novell, Cisco, Oracle, Sybase, and CA. To help B2B vendors understand and implement best practices to meet today's economic buyer needs, Alinean has created the Fight Frugalnomics™ Resource Center at http://www.fightfrugalnomics.com. For more information about Alinean, visit http://www.alinean.com or call 407.382.0005.

Alinean® is a trademark of Alinean, Inc., in the United States. All other brands, products or service names are or may be trademarks, registered trademarks or service marks of, and used to identify, products or services of their respective owners.

SOURCE Alinean